The Candidates
USA Today/Gallup General Election Poll, conducted March 14th-15th, 2008
- Barack Obama 49%
- John McCain 47%
- Hillary Clinton 51%
- John McCain 46%
Gallup surveyed 685 “likely” voters across the nation from Friday through Sunday. The margin of error on each result is +/- 4 percentage points.
March 18th, 2008 at 10:22 am
This is the good news out of the poll, which is indeed good news.
The bad news, though, is that even with these numbers, McCain still loses to Obama by 2 and to Clinton by 5. How can this be?
The problem is people are practically just as favorably disposed toward Obama as they are to McCain. For comparison, at this point in the 2004 election season, John Kerry held a 28% favorability rating (CBS News, 3/10-14/04) compared to Obama’s 62%. In fact, the highest favorability rating Kerry ever garnered during the campaign was somewhere around 41-49%, depending on which pollster you read at the time.
Obviously, when you have three candidates all over 50%, you’ve got a relatively large sub-segment of the population that is okay with any of them. Even more so if it’s a McCain-Obama matchup.
I’m not saying this to disparage McCain at all - I am glad his favorables are this high and it gives us a great position of strength to campaign from. I’m just saying we’ve still got a hard slog ahead of us.
March 18th, 2008 at 10:23 am
Kavon, sorry for the double posting… my internet connection’s been acting up over here. You can delete one of them - my apologies!